person's names

(I've worked realy hard to earn mine.)
But what for those who doesn't speak any forreign language?What could they do to get their texts translated?
Giving points is not good because there are students sending homeworks to be done too.

I don't know. I think of this site as a translation exchange website, where you earn points by translating, and you can use those towards having something translated from or to a language you don't know.

Maybe people who don't speak a foreign language should try some other service - google?

But of course this is entirely up to jp - it's his baby.

For sure.The small texts such as names and single words could be easily tranlated on this kind of website and some fine softwares available for free all arround the world.This was my first thought when arrived that cute message that some translation according to my profile was requested and I got a name in there.That was not good. The sollution will come at anytime.Good luck for jp and his beautiful son (or daughter)

Im not sure that the pople who gets the free translation points are those who request the most translations of names. Maybe you see a change in requests since cucumis was giving free points to regular members ?

To discuss about giving points to members, I recall that only 300 points are given to a user that come back 10 days after last request or after last donation. This is not very much and it rewards the people who come back on cucumis.
If you look at the "richest" member of cucumis, they never request any translations on cucumis. In the contrary, people who use the translation service and come back on cucumis to gain new free points, submit, in my opinion, more interesting translation requests than new members. Because they know the rules beter and beter and because we can trust them more and more and want to help them.

Hmm. The richest member - that would be me. And you're right - I almost never request any translations. That's a good point - we need those non-translators because they bring in the most interesting translations, if I understood you correctly. But then who is it who is bringing in all of those names?

In fact when you register, you can use 300 points and go down to -300 points. I don't communicate on this and I don't want to offer "300 of welcome points" because we would have a lot of problems with members spaming and registereing with different user names. This would be a nightmare.
Most of the name translations come from new members I guess.

Users can be
-people who don't know about foreign langages, or don't know enough in the language to get an accurate translation by themselves but need to translate a text, among them can be
*people who need a translation of their CV or other professional mail (including trading, comercy)
*people who need translations for their job (technicians, scientists, agricultors, teachers, officers, industrial)
*Kids who've got problems for a translation
required at school
* People who received a mail, or want to send one, including sms
* people who want to translate poetry, songs, philosophic thoughts into another language
* people (as caspertavernello said) whose culture includes translation of names, or transcription of these names into a language not using the same characters than their usual one.
I may have forgotten some of them, but mostly here are a few different categories of people who require the system of free points every ten days.
People interested in translating answer their requests, and we've got here at Cucumis very good translators.
When I first register at Cucumis, it was to translate an Email I received from a Spanish speaking woman. Then I needed to send other couple of Emails in Spanish, which is a language I'd like to learn. I could do translations from English into French, from Latin into French, and a few other translations from and into different other languages (mostly short translations).
But I'm far from being a professional linguist, I just love to learn from those who are really efficient in this discipline, and sharing knowledge with them. Here I'm learning everyday, and I must say that without Cucumis I'd feel like apple said (cold turkey!)
Now that I've been expert, then admin here, I've submited very often texts to translation into English, in order to be able to evaluate translation of the same texts into french. If I didn't do that, my capital of points would be much more important than it is actually, but I don't care too much about my points, as I "reinvest" them to get forwards in my expert and admin job, this is my way to give back what I've received here.
So that any problem which could overflew us (the "nightmare" JP just told about here above)is for me a priority, knowing that all I can do is suggesting solutions to JP, unfortunately not knowing if they are going to be practically appliable.
About names, I've been thinking that maybe storing the names translations requests would be doable the same way as it is done with languages, under a "flag", like also could be "other languages"(like minoritary languages which aren't indexed at Cucumis). If all of us have probably got ideas and suggestions only JP can answer and tell if it is doable and if it makes sense to him using such solutions...

The 2 objectives I have in mind about the name translations is first to avoid duplicated requests and second to avoid translations from and to same alphabets. As we have already a lot of names already translated, I guess I should improve the search feature. But this is not easy because searching is consuming a lot of ressources and the database is growing everyday.
To avoid translations from and to same alphabet, I will display something like

"Requests about first names and last names only have a sense between different alpahabets. Please perform a [1]search[/1] before submitting; to be sure your request has not already been submitted by someone else. All abusive requests about names might be removed."

By the way, Kafetzou or someone else, could you give me a correct english version of this text ?

Francky, I got a little lost in your post above, but I really liked the list of possible users - it made me think about it.

jp, here's my (free) version of your text above:

"Translations of names only make sense when what is requested is simply a transcription from one alphabet to another. Please perform a [1]search[/1] to be sure your request has not already been translated before your submit it. Abusive name translation requests may be removed."

But I have another suggestion. We could also put in the following:

"Please specify in your name translation request whether you would like the sound of the name transcribed or whether you would like the meaning translated. If it is the meaning you are looking for, please provide any information you have about it."

P.S. What are abusive name translation requests?

Another problem occurs to me. If they only want the sound transcribed, and thus are not allowed to request a translation from, say, Brazilian Portuguese to English, but the person who knows Arabic doesn't know Brazilian Portuguese, how will the Arabic translator see the request?

I think he means between languages with the same alphabet.
"Please specify in your name translation request whether you would like the sound of the name transcribed or whether you would like the meaning translated. In both cases, please provide any information that might help us."
It's difficult to give suggestions when one knows nothing about informatics.
The simplest thing to do could be:
1 abolish names' translation
2 abolish Latin translation.
In this way we could get rid of all tattoo rubbish.
Anyway, there's lot of sites all over the web about names, and also about Latin mottos and proverbs.
(The other thing for which Latin translations are requested is homework; I never did that for my son, why should I do it for unknown boys and girls?)
You may think I'm being too drastic, but if the purpose of cucumis is to help people who need (for any reason) to communicate in a language they don't know, no one need names and Latin proverbs translation to communicate.
Less drastic solution: two separate sections for names and for proverbs (the tattoo club).

I'm afraid I agree with apple.

Bonjour, excusez-moi l'intrusion, mais en réponse à ce que dit JP, j'ai eu une idée pour chercher les textes à propos de noms et choses comme ça: un filtre. Un filtre qui peut filtrer les textes "en base" (??) à son nomebre de points. Par exemple, je voudrais chercher tous les textes inférieurs (ou supérieurs) à 50 points.
J'éspère que ça soit intéressant...

"Another problem occurs to me. If they only want the sound transcribed, and thus are not allowed to request a translation from, say, Brazilian Portuguese to English, but the person who knows Arabic doesn't know Brazilian Portuguese, how will the Arabic translator see the request?"
C'est pour ça que moi je demande souvent une traduction anglaise

"Please specify in your name translation request whether you would like the sound of the name transcribed or whether you would like the meaning translated. If it is the meaning you are looking for, please provide any information you have about it."
That's a good idea! Mais le "sound" est rélatif à la prononcation anglaise? Parce que, p.e, la "a", en italien on prononce comme la "a" de "American", la "e" comme la "e" de "enough", ecc... Et pour ça on devrait ajouter à "... you would like the sound..." une remarque à ce propos... Est-ce que je me trompe? (excusez moi, mais mon anglais ne me permet pas de m'exprimer de cette façon...)

Pardon, apple, mais j'écrivais entre-temps que tu as posté ton dernier message

That sounds a good solution, drastic but good

This what I see now for the warning :

"Translations of names are not authorized and will be removed. Please refer to specialized websites for such translations."

I'm OK for names but why for Latin ? In your opinion I should remove the Latin language from cucumis ? I think that proverbs translations canbe interesting, but maybe I'm wrong. But for the homework, we should maybe do something, and it's not only related to Latin.

Could we add something like
"The goal of cucumis is not to do your homework. This kind of requests might be removed."

About Latin, two very obvious considerations:
1) Latin is a dead language
2) The native speakers are also all dead.
Competence in Latin or in any other dead language is something really different from competence in spoken languages. The references about when and how to use one form or another are only in books: it's not easy, you can't learn Latin with a full immersion experience. To be a latinistis a life-time work (and not very amusing, I think!)

So, I agree

I think those who like latin don't consider it like boring, and I think this language is an amazingly well organized language. It is "mother" language for Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese and French, (and other languages not indexed on Cucumis, like Gallician) and it has influenced other languages too. It is a good exercise for young members in order to increase etymologic knowledge, and I think that even if it is a dead language, it is still usefull and interesting. I personaly wouldn't like to see Latin disappear from the Cucumis languages, but this is just my personal point of view.

1) I agree with Francky - I love Latin. On the other hand, what apple meant about Latin is that it's not used for communication, and she's right about that.

2) As for the homework requests, as a teacher I can tell you that any teacher who is worth her salt (= good) can immediately understand if her students did the work themselves or had a native speaker of the target language do it for them!

Anyway, how do we know that the kid didn't actually do the homework, but just wants to compare what s/he did with what a translator would do?

3) I'm not sure I agree with the idea of eliminating names altogether.

4) nava91 is right about the sound of the name being relative, but I think we can assume when someone wants the sound of the name transcribed, they want the way the name sounds in the original language. Maybe it would make sense for anyone who knows the sound of that language to put a note under the translation for the transcriber.

For example, there's one up there now - "tuğçem" - from Turkish. The sound of this, written in Italian, would be "tucem" (English "too-chem" ). There are ways of indicating pronunciation without using the IPA pronunciation symbols, although I guess that's also a possibility (tuw-tʃɛm).

Ah, voilà comment s'appelle! IPA! Mais je ne crois pas que ce soit une bonne idée, parce que, par exemple, moi je ne comprend pas cette "symbolographie", et je ne saurais capable de lire symboles de prononciation... Et puis, je pense que pas tous peuvent lire cette écriture, pour un problème "téchnique": ces symboles Internet Explorer ne les "lit" pas, en fait je vois "tuw-" et puis deux carrés, et puis "m"...

Ah - pardon! Je pensais que ça peut être le fait. Tu as raison que ça ce n'est pas une bonne solution.

P.S. IPA = International Phonetic Alphabet (API en français?)